by Cora Lee
Hartland offered a smile that was almost demure. “Something like that, yes.”
“Oh, come now. You can’t put me off with a nothing answer. I detect a story in that little smile of yours, and I’d like very much to hear it.”
His smile widened, but there was little joy in it. “Ollie was invalided home last year. He was wounded in the leg at the Battle of Albuera, and infection had set in. His parents and eldest brother were at the family plantation in Barbados, his middle brother on a ship somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean on his way to join them, so there was no one here to care for him.”
“So you cared for him.”
Hartland scrubbed a hand across the back of his neck and rose. “I brought him here, actually. Found the best physician to attend him, hired some women from the village to see to all his needs. It was weeks before we knew if he’d live.”
This was not the brash, arrogant Hartland bragging about the good deed he’d done. There was real fear on Hartland’s face, though Sarah doubted he realized it. He’d come so close to losing his friend, the man who was his brother in all but blood, and the memory was clearly still a powerful one.
“You must have been terrified,” she said softly.
He wandered over to her sofa and sat at the far end of it, resting his elbows on his thighs. “I was.”
“You saved his life.”
“No, the physician and the women who tended him saved his life.”
Sarah wanted to touch him, to put her arms around this unexpectedly vulnerable Hartland and comfort him. But she still didn’t know him all that well, and she wasn’t sure how he would react to such an overture. Instead she offered him what she hoped were encouraging words. “You orchestrated his survival, then. And his recovery, too, I’d bet.”
Hartland reclined back against the sofa cushions, the emotion of a moment ago vanished into his usual smirk. “A lady should never wager, you know. But in this case you would have won—Ollie stayed here for nearly six months, traipsing around the grounds just as soon as the physician allowed him to do so. Have you been out to see the rest of the estate yet?”
“No.” As if he didn’t already know that with all his following her around.
He popped up off the sofa and extended his hand to her. “Shall we, my lady?”
She cast a longing look at the book lying beside her but decided to take Hartland up on his offer. He would undoubtedly continue to dog her every move, and if they were walking the grounds at least he wouldn’t fidget. “I believe we shall, my lord,” she answered, taking his hand and rising. “Where do we begin?”
After changing into her half-boots, Sarah headed out with Hartland into the valley that surrounded the Abbey and they walked side-by-side along the stream at the edge of the property. He didn’t offer her his hand or arm again, and actually made a point to keep two or three feet of space between them at all times. Was he embarrassed by his earlier display of emotion?
“Have you had any further information about my situation?” It was only the two of them, and they were surrounded by nothing but countryside and animals. Surely it was safe to speak of it out here.
“No.” The word was clipped and he kicked at a rock as they passed it.
“Oh.” Perhaps that was why he’d been following her like a lovesick lad. He was feeling the need to do something, to spring into action, but there was no action to take just now.
Hartland continued to follow the stream in silence—with Sarah tagging along like an unwanted little sister—until they reached an old stone bridge and a pair of much newer buildings. He kept walking, but she noticed his pace slowed a little and his eyes focus on the larger of the two buildings.
“What are those for?”
He gestured to the larger of the two buildings, made from white stone with floor-to-ceiling windows spread across the front. “That’s my workshop, and that—” He pointed to the less elegant building beside it, built from a dark brick that closely matched the main house. “—is the forge.”
“You have a forge?”
His smile returned, this time with the sort of affection that gentlemen usually reserve for their favorite horses. “It was built sometime after the abbey became a private home. I have a smith who comes to Hartland every few weeks to make the repairs on my armor that are beyond my skill, and he works here now.”
She took a few steps closer to the bridge and paused there, trying to get a better look at the old forge. “Do you ever work in there?”
“A gentleman would never dirty his hands so.”
His statement was delivered in a deadpan voice and she turned her focus to Hartland’s face. “You are not the average gentleman, though.”
His smile widened just a fraction and he came to stand beside her, looking over the two buildings. “I might know my way around a hammer and anvil.”
“I’m trying to picture you in a leather apron and heavy gloves, but it isn’t quite working.”
His eyebrows lifted in surprise and Sarah immediately felt ridiculous. Her mother would have been shocked by such an admission.
“Would you like to watch me work?”
“I-I would like to learn more about your work. What is your armor like?”
“I have different types for different situations,” he replied, the corners of his mouth turning upward. “Some plate pieces, like the knights of old. Some made more like garments with plates on the inside. There are other pieces, other materials, scattered around my other properties so I always have something on hand in case I need it. I’ll show you this workshop another time, and you can see what I have here.”
They resumed their walk along the stream and, though their conversation was still sparse, Hartland’s body drifted closer to Sarah’s. His step was lighter, too—he was fairly bouncing as they approached the mouth of the stream.
“Do you think you can manage a climb up to the top of the cliff? There’s a path, but it’s a bit steep. Or are you too tired?”
She grabbed his elbow and turned him to face her, tugging him to a stop. “Queen Elizabeth may have considered herself ‘weak and feeble’ but I do not. I am stronger than you think I am.”
“You’ll tell me if you need a rest?”
“I will.”
He squinted his eyes at her and pressed his lips together, but ultimately relented. “You walk on this side of me,” he told her, positioning her to his left, “and don’t peek over the edge. The view from the top is even more breathtaking when you don’t see it coming.”
A quarter of the way up Sarah was congratulating herself for wearing half-boots rather than slippers. The climb was steeper and the terrain rougher than anything she’d experienced walking the streets of London. Halfway up she stumbled but Hartland’s hands were at her waist and wrist, holding her securely.
“All right?”
She tested both ankles. “All right.”
He released her wrist but kept a hand at the small of her back all the way to the top of the cliff. His touch didn’t provide much in the way of physical support, but it did help to spur her onward along the path.
Just as they crested the cliff, Hartland’s hands came over her eyes. “Don’t look yet!”
“Hartland, what are you doing?”
Her words were nearly carried away by the wind blowing off the Atlantic, and he leaned close to her ear when he answered her. “I told you, it’s better if you see it all at once.”
He took her own hand and placed it over her eyes, then put his hands on her shoulders and steered her into the wind. Her hair blew straight back, some of the pins coming loose before she could put her free hand to her head, and she suddenly wished she’d remembered to wear a bonnet.
“Don’t look yet! Take three steps forward, I won’t let you fall.”
She obeyed, stepping slowly forward as he counted aloud. He hadn’t gone to all the trouble of marrying her and saving her from a murderer only to throw her off a cliff. They halted together and she felt his warm breath on her ear
when he leaned in again and spoke.
“Now.”
She dropped her hand from her eyes and sucked in a breath. The cliff face rose out of the ocean in jagged brown edges with a thin coating of green grass across the top, and the bluest water she’d ever seen lapped at the little beach below.
“Oh, Hartland...”
“‘Beautiful’ doesn’t quite seem strong enough, does it?”
He slid his arms around her waist and she leaned back against him, shaking her head. “I doubt I could ever find words to describe this place.”
“It’s one of my favorite parts of the estate. I come up here sometimes when I have trouble with an invention, or when I can’t solve a problem. Something about the breeze and the sun and the view always clears my head.”
“This place must be absolutely ferocious during a storm, though.”
“It is. In fact, it’s more than a little dangerous if the storm is heavy. Promise me you won’t come up here alone in bad weather. Strike that—promise me you won’t come up here alone at all, at least until we sort out your situation.”
Sarah tilted her face up to the sun, grateful for the shelter Hartland’s body provided. “It seems like such a small thing to agree to when you’ve sworn to protect my life.”
“Nevertheless, I will have your word on this.”
She breathed in a great lungful of sea air and let it out slowly. “I can’t promise to always be an easy person to protect, but I will promise never to deliberately put myself in harm’s way without consulting you first.”
“You’ve been an Elliott less than a week, and already you sound like one of us.” He loosened his arms and turned her around, brushing the hair away from her face when the wind blew it across her eyes. “But I’m serious about this. Even this far from London, you must be on your guard.”
Her never-too-serious husband was frowning hard enough to put a crease just above the bridge of his nose, and she traced it with her forefinger. “I will be vigilant, Hartland. I swear.”
He pushed her finger away and held her gaze for a long moment. Then he kissed her forehead and turned her to the magnificent view once more, wrapping his arms around her and holding her close. “Good.”
~~~
“My lord, a messenger has arrived from London.”
Hart looked up from the book of Latin poetry he’d been attempting to read to see his butler, Nichols, holding out a silver salver with a sealed letter. “The special messenger?”
“No, my lord. The one you left with Major Oliver.”
Hart glanced over at Sarah in her now-customary place on the drawing room sofa, and forced himself to move at a normal pace as he accepted the letter. What he really wanted to do was tear the letter open and read it as fast as he could, but it wouldn’t do to alarm his countess.
“Thank you, Nichols. See the messenger gets a meal and a bed for the night. I’ll have a response for him to carry back to Town tomorrow.”
Nichols bowed and left, and Hart broke the seal on the letter. He quickly scanned the pages of Ollie’s utilitarian handwriting, hoping for information, for seeds of a plan to deal with the threat on Sarah’s life.
What he found was like a punch to the gut.
The words were all jumbled as his eyes darted from one part of the page to the other, but he shifted his focus to a spot on the floor, took a breath, and tried again. Ollie wrote of some kind of attack in London, of bombs being detonated in a shop in Bond Street and some mysterious gas that filled the place. No one had been killed by the explosions, but the gas had an ill effect on many of those who’d been trapped in the shop. The perpetrator was unknown, and not likely to be discovered given the chaos that ensued.
He put a hand over his mouth, both to satisfy the urge to move and to keep himself from speaking. This was awful news in so many ways, but he decided not to concern Sarah with it—she already had enough to worry about.
Hart felt sick. There was no guarantee he would have been in that shop to stop the destruction, but it was likely he would have been nearby. And he would have been the lead horse in the pursuit that followed. He would have been there to track down the person that devised the attack and deliver him to the magistrate. He would have been there to see that the people caught in the shop received medical care, even if meant paying for it himself.
He would have been there to do something.
Balling up Ollie’s letter, Hart squeezed it in one fist as hard as he could. Why had he been in such a hurry to leave London?
“Everything all right over there?”
Sarah’s voice carried lightly across the room and Hart trained his gaze on her. There was no sun today, only a misty drizzle outside the large window, but she looked comfortable and content lying on the sofa with a book.
“Everything is fine,” he replied, flashing her a smile. “Just a note from Ollie. Apparently a large number of ladies in Town have taken to their beds at the news of our marriage.”
“Better than you taking to their beds.”
He laughed. “Why Lady Hartland, you wound me.”
She didn’t look up from the page she was reading but he saw her lips curl into a small smile. “Do I?”
“No.” He tossed the crumpled paper the length of the room so he didn’t have to look at it. “I know my reputation.”
Sarah closed the book over her thumb and turned her gaze on him. “But people are often more complex than mere reputations.”
“Am I?”
“So far.”
That pleased him more than he’d expected it to, and he felt his body relaxing slightly. Being able to temporarily push the shop bombing out of his mind helped, too. “I’ll try not to disappoint you.”
“You never have.”
She picked up her book again and Hartland was thrown back into Ollie’s letter, into that shop filled with explosions and noxious gas. Except he hadn’t been there. And those people got hurt.
He’d done more than disappoint them. He’d left them unprotected.
There was a knock on the drawing room door and Nichols entered, once more bearing a silver tray with a sealed letter. “From the special messenger, my lord.”
More information—wonderful. The more he knew, the better, and maybe this time it would be knowledge he could use. He plucked the letter from Nichols’ tray and dismissed him, breaking the seal and unfolding the paper as fast as his fingers would move.
“Does ‘special messenger’ mean what I think it means?” Sarah asked from the sofa.
“You mean, does it have anything to do with your situation?” he returned, trying to keep his voice even.
She extended him the courtesy of several silent moments to read through the letter before prompting him. “Well?”
It was an account of the shop bombing, this time from Joanna Devlin—his Irish contact and the first member of Wellington’s intelligence gathering ring—dated a day later than Ollie’s. She had included a few details Ollie probably hadn’t known, and confirmed the chaos at the scene. She also added a progress report on those that had been in the shop during the incident.
Three people have died so far, and a fourth will probably not last the night. But it wasn’t the blasts that injured them, it was the gas that was contained inside the bombs. I spoke with one of the physicians who attended a victim, and he described his patient’s symptoms as coughing and a burning sensation in the throat and eyes that progressed to nausea and vomiting. Then the lungs filled with fluid.
Hart cleared his throat. “Sorry, sweetheart. Nothing here about your admirer.”
Her eyebrows drew together and her shoulders sagged, but Hart couldn’t find the strength to try to make her smile. Three—probably four by now—people had died while Hart was hundreds of miles away taking a walk with his wife.
He rose in one swift motion and practically ran from the room. How could he sit there and continue to assure Sarah he would protect her when people were dying in London? How could he look her in the eyes when she was
the reason he wasn’t in Town?
He had just enough presence of mind to change into an older pair of trousers and worn shirt before heading out to his workshop. He had one at every home he owned, but the workshop at Hartland Abbey was particularly well-equipped. Between it and the forge next door, he could build practically anything. And while it was too late for the people who had already died, perhaps he could come up with a way to protect people the next time the bomber took his special toys out to play.
He had to.
“My lord, Lady Hartland sent me to ask if you will be taking your dinner here or in the dining room.”
Hart looked up from the table he’d been hunched over to see his valet, Richards, standing before him. The light that had previously been pouring in through the arched windows had dwindled to a trickle, and Hart realized the sun had nearly sunk below the horizon.
He lit the lamp closest to him and looked around for another. “How long have I been out here?”
“About six hours.”
Six hours, and all he had to show for it was a heap of failure. He’d been attempting to create a mask of sorts that would scrub impurities—like the shop bombing’s mysterious gas—from the air and make it safe to breathe. But so far he’d only managed to create a pile of misshapen rubber and shattered glass.
“Did Lady Hartland say whether or not she preferred my company?”
“No, my lord.”
“Has she asked about me in any capacity other than dinner arrangements?” Hart had commanded two of his burliest footmen to watch over her in his stead. Had she missed him at all?
“Not to me, but she could have asked Nichols or one of the other servants.”
Would he be able to sit across from Sarah and act like nothing was wrong? Could he walk away from the mask before he had a working model? “Tell Lady Hartland I’ll be in when I finish my work here.”
“I’ll have the kitchen prepare a tray for you.”
Hart nodded and turned back to his worktable. If he was still there in the morning, Richards would also make arrangements for breakfast and clean clothing to be sent out. The footmen he’d set to guarding Sarah would remain with her until he gave them leave to return to their regular duties. Nothing else needed his specific attention, and he could go on working.
